Fairfield County residents organize for Hartford rally

Kate King

Published 8:53 pm, Tuesday, February 12, 2013

STAMFORD -- Betsy Stone spent three days volunteering as a psychologist in Newtown after the Dec. 14 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, an experience she said left her feeling "helpless" until she decided to join the fight for stricter gun control and expanded mental health services in Connecticut.

Stone, a Stamford resident, talked to about a dozen people affected by the mass shooting that left 20 first-graders and six educators dead. She was floored by what she heard.

"I knew in my gut how bad and how out-of-control the gun problem was in this country," Stone said Tuesday. "But there's nothing like listening to a small child tell you what it sounded like from across the hall."

Stone plans to participate in Thursday's March for Change in Hartford, an event aimed at encouraging state legislators to enact stricter gun control laws this legislative session.

"I need to use my voice and my feet to say how important this is," Stone said. "One of the things that became very clear to me after the shootings in Newtown is we cannot trust the federal government to make the kind of changes that need to happen. This change is going to have to happen at a state level."

U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., said he agrees that there is little hope for significant movement on gun control laws at the federal level. Since the Newtown shooting, Himes has called for a reinstatement of the federal ban on assault weapons and assault ammunition magazines, universal background checks, strengthening of the national criminal background database and crackdown on illegal gun trafficking.

"Realistically speaking I think we might just have a chance at universal background checks," Himes said Tuesday. "Unfortunately I think the assault weapon ban and caps on magazine size face a very daunting path in Washington."

Thursday's rally in Hartford will be held at 11 a.m. on the north steps of the state Capitol building and is expected to attract thousands of participants, said Connecticut Against Gun Violence Executive Director Ron Pinciaro. CAGV is sponsoring the event in partnership with March for Change, a grassroots gun control advocacy group formed by two Fairfield mothers in the wake of the Newtown shooting.

"The statement that we want to make is that the people of Connecticut want change in our gun laws. We want change in the conversation," Pinciaro said. "Now it's time for the legislators to see what this incident (in Newtown) and all of these mass shootings -- what this has done to the people of Connecticut and that they're demanding significant change now."

"The rest of the world is watching to see what Connecticut can do," Pinciaro said. "We feel that this time it's going to happen. So we'll see."

CTMomsOnline.com, a nonprofit parenting forum founded by Westport resident Medha Thomas, has reserved 45 buses to drive an estimated 2,000 Fairfield County residents to Hartford on Thursday.

"As a population, mothers have been silent about gun laws," Thomas said. "But when a shooter comes into an elementary school and harms our kids, that's when mothers as a group rise and we say, `No more.' We're a demographic that is hard to reckon with."

Buses will be departing from about a dozen Fairfield County locations at 9:15 a.m. Thursday and are expected to return by 2 or 3 p.m. The cost is $26 per person with some seats still available. For more information, visit www.ctmomsonline.com/marchforchange.

"It's important for us to show our legislators that we're not just a bunch of talkers, we're not just a bunch of people sitting behind desks or phones," Thomas said. "We're real people and we're real voters."